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Sure it may look good on paper, but I wonder if these guys have thought about the opinion of the general public of Open Source/GNU/Linux etc.

I have been involved in the marketing (dirty word I know!) of software and hardware to non-technical people for a number of years. The consultancy group I work for numbers many of America's top blue-chip electronics and software corporations among its clients, I have over 11 years experience of marketing, and 4 years experience of software development (VB) and systems administration (NT 3.51), in addition to a marketing science qualification from one of America's top business schools - so it's safe to say that I know what I am talking about when it comes to computers and marketing.

I have been keeping an eye this forum for quite some time now, as part of my daily intelligence gathering, I find the robust exchange of views, and technical arguments make an interesting diversion from some of the other corporate bullshit I have to deal with in my working day. I also read corporate intelligence reports from the Gartner group, Forrester, the Meta group, and Olsen Online Business Intelligence Services. Slashdot has often proved to be far more accurate when it comes to the technical details,and I am often amazed at the incredible levels of intelligence and insight shown by its readership, some of whom demonstrate a knowledge of Linux and Operating systems far in advance of anyone I have ever met, even in the IS department of major corporations. For this reason, I feel I should contribute my 2c to the debate about the future direction of Linux and the whole Open Source movement in general.

I feel I can do my bit for the Open Source community by offering (free of charge) some of my hard-earned knowledge straight from the bloody trenches at the front-line of tech-Marketing. Normally I would be paid over $4000/day for my perspective, but Slashdot - this one's on me. You people can think of it as my small and unworthy attempt to "give something back" to the Community.

Why Linux/Open Source has an image problem in major US Corporations and what the community can do about it. Like any movment, political or religious, Open Source/Linux has its Leaders, High priests and Gurus. These high profile individuals represent the public face of the organization. Like it or not, these people are associated with the product in the eyes of the buying public. One of the first things the Linux movement must do in order to gain acceptence by middle-America and Joe-and-Jean Sixpack and their 2.4 kids, is to develop what we in the Marketing profession call a "Happy Face".

When Joe Sixpack drives past a McDonald's, he associates it with the smiling face of Ronald McDonald the clown,and quality food served quickly. When he is choosing a collect-call company, the smiling face of Al Bundy (of TV's Married with Children) springs to mind, and when he thinks of fried chicken in large capacity bucket-like containers, it is the image of the happy-go-lucky avuncular Colonel with his associations of good old Southern hospitality that sticks in his memory. (In marketing terms this is known as a "positive association". Because the image puts the consumer into a "buying-receptive" mental state).

Linux/Open Source lacks any kind of "Happy Face". Now this in itself is not a problem, were it not for the fact that Linux has several extremely high-profile advocates who are the exact opposite of "Happy Faces" in that they invite negative associations into the consumers head and put him/her into a state known by Marketers as "passive-aggressive sales-message rejection" (In layman's terms they don't

Consider who is bringing you this information and take it with a grain of salt. Jupiter is in the business of consulting, and is on nearly every reporter's Rolodex as a source of that all-important statistic to anchor whatever tech story they're writing. So right off the bat they have a potential conflict of interest -- accuracy v. self-promotion as "the source" the data.

If you listen carefully, nearly every time a web usage statistic is cited it will be attributed to either Jupiter or Forrester Research -- another (surprise) consulting firm. Listen to the news for these names and you'll be impressed how lazy and naive reporters can be, they often do a lot less research than it appears.

Next, the NYT profiled them a couple of years ago in the Sunday Magazine. I don't have a link, but recommend you consider buying it (and I never do that!). Basically, it detailed how little experience the average analyst has; how difficult and unscientific it is to come up with data on things like banner ad clicks or to extrapolate tech trends; and quoted one analyst admitting that they were instructed, should the media call with a question they couldn't answer, they should make something up. Often they are spectacularly wrong, but who calls them on it? Again, the all-important goal is to get their name in the press, Jupiter is willing to give an opinion, it's free advertising. Note how Jupiter's name made it into even this short posting?

I hate to think of businesses making important decisions based on such loosely-derived bits of data. So when I see a spam prediction such as here, I know there's a fair chance it's either an uneducated guess or simply pulled out of someone's ass. Maybe they're right, but I'd like to hear about their methodology. If they say they just went to the Oracle at Delphi (don't those names sound familiar?) then get on with our lives. Spam will still be a problem either way; there are proven ways to fight it; realistically we will never allow it to get to such levels.

I encourage anyone interested not to believe me and do their own research. IMHO, this is one of the biggest scams this side of the pollsters and brokerage houses. I am deeply contemptuous of their work. Just a statement of opinion, not libel, no siree.

P.S. May I throw in that I don't like seeing spam victims blamed for their plight. I have been scrupulous with my email for years and still the spam is inexorably growing, largely because of some idiot who opted-in to a dozen things mistakenly typing in my email address instead of his. Now my address is burned into a CD somewhere. Fault is unnecessary; and regardless of fault, the blame lies with the spammer. Naive users do not "deserve" to have their email paralyzed, rather they deserve our sympathy and help.

Not all of us here at Slashdot are being hypocritical: some of us actually have research to support our claims. Thanks for generalizing, though.

They also said the bad economy was a factor, and said specifically they didn't believe piracy to be having any significant effect.

Quoting:

Labels are in trouble, and it's not from file sharing. To tap into $2 billion in new revenues, they must let people find, copy, and pay for music on their own terms.

Yes, the full report costs $495. But I figure that's less than I've spent on CDs that I bought as a result of being able to download samples for free.

Quoting the introduction:
"Labels are in trouble, and it's not from file sharing. To tap into $2 billion in new revenues, they must let people find, copy, and pay for music on their own terms."

Free as in speech, but not as in beer. Not that beer is ever really free...

What is the government's responsibility anyway?

The Government, and more specifically, the tresuary, is responsible for ensuring a healthy and expanding economy in a way which generates measurable wealth, and by extension, raises the standard of living for the people. This is achieved through the application of macro economics, where the interest rates and taxes are adjusted in order to encourage or discourage lending & spending, whichever is the desired effect.

The Government is not there to act as the Copyright Policing Division for any sector of industry, E.g. the RIAA & MPAA member corporations. Its a sure fire way to create a stagnent economy.

As if the relationship between piracy and music sales is so direct and immediate that you could turn Napster on and sales would immediately skyrocket.

Sorry, but that is the case. You're making a strawman argument concerning the timescales involved, but you could measure the effect on sales over the period as small as a week, certainly. The music industry already performs these sorts of measurements on a weekly basis. Its called the Top 40.

Not only that, but Forrester, the market research people have reached many of the same conclusions that most Slashdot users have in the past two or three years: The RIAA & MPAA members benefited from MP3 swapping, and the reason that their sales are bottoming out is because people are bored of listening to the same generic pop.

Now if you want to argue with Forrester, I would suggest you email them directly. I'm sure they'd be delighted in hearing your comments.

This is not the first such workshop that has been held.

The previous was held on December 17, 2001: http://www.ta.doc.gov/PRel/MA011214.htm

Participants included all the usual suspects including the MPAA, RIAA, Microsoft, and Intel

Interestingly, one of the participants was Forrester Research who, in their public archives which unfortunatly only has summaries available, include several reports such as:

whose summaries with punch line conclusions like "Media companies turn into eBusiness network" alone would have been enough to curl the nose hairs of any movie / recording industry executive still stuck in the 90s (1990s that is).

The Deloitte and Forrester research companies measure progress in the growth of e-commerce and forecast that by the end of 2002, online sales are expected to exceed $1 trillion, consisting of business-to-business sales of $842 billion and business-to-consumer sales of $180 billion (5). What effect could an Internet sales taxes have on these projected online sales? A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the imposition of sales taxes could reduce online spending by as much as 30%. A 30% reduction in projected online consumer sales of $180 billion means $54 billion in lost retail sales. A 5% tax rate on the remaining $126 billion in sales would yield $ 6.3 billion in new sales tax revenues, but result in a net loss of $ 47.7 billion to the economy. Even if a 3% sales tax resulted in a more moderate 10% reduction in online sales, the $18 billion loss in sales volume would far exceed the $ 4.86 billion in new sales tax revenues.

These are striking numbers, even if US-centric. The EU should really be careful before instituting any such thing...

Please also be aware that what Microsoft is selling will only really sing when integrated with a bunch of other MS stuff. Not really a surprise, but when the average install bill comes to around $150k, you'll wish you knew in advance.

Note 2 - the MS solution is a mid-market one.

If you're looking at the MS solution, some reading at Forrester (Scorecard Summary: Microsoft's Content Management Server 2001) and Gartner (The Web Content Management Magic Quadrant for 2001, Web Content Management: Software Comparison Columns) will definitely be worthwhile. If you're spending $150k+ on a system, $95 for an analysis of it is fairly cheap.

Part of the the problem is the same one that has been the plague of the next market. Some of it simply running out of cash for silly business plans, but some of it is irrational pessimism, in large part due to the FUD from politicians. These folks certainly deserve a portion of the blame for the business climate.

It has gone so far that you have stories like this one that I first spotted at the Register, commonly titled "Death of the Web Inevitable". This is shear bullocks, as the real story is the possible look of the WWW, version 2.0, named in the story as the "X Internet" - but the FUD Masters got to put their spin on it.

The market has evaporated because there are not so many people out there looking for the best toys to get the job done, when the problem was not so much the toys, but getting the job done.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

Eric Scheirer doesn't work for Fraunhofer, he works for Forrester Research.

Linux application support is very limited, meaning that customers end up having to build their own horizontal and vertical applications. A recent report from Forrester Research highlighted the fact that today 93 percent of enterprise ISVs develop applications for Windows NT, while only 13 percent develop for Linux.

Indeed. A few things worthy of note here:

1. The numbers are most likely coming from Forrester Research, a company that was founded to make projections about how technology impacts business. And they're traded on nasdaq. Go figure! It's like asking a Ford dealer what the best make of car is.

2. The Economist isn't always right. I've been keeping their projections for the future issues onhand for about five years now, and they simply don't do all that well. Apparently I'm not the only one -- the cover story from the June 14th issue of the New Republic ran a pretty sizable expose on it. Check it out.

3. The numbers are still pretty damn small. First, e-commerce: currently 8 billion out of 242,239 billion in consumer expenditures. A tiny fraction, seems about right. Forrester's saying in five years half of what's bought will be over the internet. ("Todd, we're out of milk... Can you hop online and order some?) Seems a little high to me! On the business to business side, I couldn't get the numbers -- if you wanted them you had to order a cdrom from the census bureau (but you couldn't order it online --the irony did not escape me). But total business reciepts were (breath!): $16,654,636,336,000. So do the math and make a rough calculation.

Lastly, let's remember that not that many people can afford computers. Also keep in mind that the vast, majority of businesses have less than four employees (no numbers handy, eek). Census dept gives us roughly 10 out of 11 as having under 20 employees, though. The cost of a comprehensive net presence isn't going to be worth it for most companies.

"the INTERNET ... revolutionizing the way you obtain porn."